Based in San Francisco but retired from his West Coast teaching jobs, stage director and choreographer Rodger Henderson could choose to be anywhere.

In his mid-60s, Henderson has a heightened sense of the fragility of life, partly due to the artist he is, partly to a recurring facial cancer that has cost him 11 operations and an eye. So since retiring, he has seized on his remaining days, making lengthy visits to London, Romania ("I wanted to see Transylvania") and a famed theater congress in Prague. He's been skydiving and zip-lining in Hawaii, ballooning in Pittsburgh and Bath and helicoptering all over.

And now he has chosen to spend one of his precious remaining years in Pittsburgh. At Point Park University, Henderson will teach and, given the insatiable curiosity that drives him, take courses. And for Quantum Theatre he has just directed "Therese Raquin," Nicholas Wright's adaptation of Emile Zola's famous 19th-century novel and play, which opened Friday.

Why Pittsburgh? Because there's "so much going on in the arts," he says. "I love the talent."

Pittsburgh grew on Henderson gradually, as is often the case. Quantum's Karla Boos brought him here first in 1996 to direct "Polygraph," which put Quantum on the cultural map. He has returned to Quantum regularly, directing "Hapgood" (1998), "Kill the Old Torture Their Young" (1999), "Dark of the Moon" (2005) and, last year, both "The Crucible" and "After Mrs. Rochester."

Normally, Henderson disappears after an opening, believing that the play now belongs to the actors. But doing two plays in succession last year gave him some down time in which to see more of Pittsburgh. He also met more theater people.

So he told Boos he'd come back this year if she would schedule a play with good roles for Robin Walsh and two other actors he especially likes to work with. Independently of that, he had seen "Therese Raquin" in London and sent it to Walsh as a possible title role for her. And later, quite coincidentally, Boos sent the same play to Walsh, asking if she thought Henderson would want to direct it.

Because it perfectly filled his request, the deal was quickly done. And because they had all worked on "Mrs. Rochester" at the Carnegie Library in Braddock, it was natural (in the quirky way Quantum works) that they should decide to stage "Therese Raquin" in the unused swimming pool in that same building.

With this assignment settled, Henderson asked Walsh if he could take some classes while he was here. As head of the graduate acting program at Point Park, she got the ball rolling, and he decided to commit for a year. A friend, artist Atticus Adams, arranged a small apartment in a Bloomfield tower, and he signed for it, sight unseen.

Henderson is frank that cancer has affected "how I look at [no pun intended] the world. All the cliches are true; do what you can while you can; life is short; work with the people you want to."

That life is uncertain, he points out, is true for everyone. In his case, he goes every six months to be tested, and, judging by past developments and his decision not to have radiation treatment because of the fear of side effects, "I know sometime they won't be able to do anything for me. ... I know I'm riding on an edge. Everybody is."

As to the loss of his eye, he says, "It's something you live with." The many operations have left the right side of his face sunken, so he wears a large eye-and-cheek patch, which gives him an unusual aspect on first sight. He used to be shy about that. What opened him up "is kids. They look right at you. If I saw myself, I'd look, too. ... You see what you do have, not what you don't."

Henderson grew up 50 miles from San Francisco in Pittsburg, Calif. -- and as he says it, he notices for the first time the symmetry between two Pittsburghs.

"I had kind of a mixed-up family," he says. High school theater was a refuge. He went to San Francisco State in 1962, right in the middle of the Vietnam War. He marvels: "We all had long hair, there were helmeted guards all around, a couple of friends got arrested ... and there we were doing [a silly musical like] 'Little Me'!"

Interested in many things, Henderson kept dropping out of college and coming back. He wanted to be a dancer and left college to study more intensely, then realized he was too old. He dropped out again to be a mime -- "yes, I was of that pursuit! I don't admit that to many people." He left college again for a job in children's theater. After seven years, he ended up with a degree in elementary education, but he wound up teaching movement at Fresno State.

Then came a temporary job at San Francisco State, which grew into full time. He also taught at A.C.T., the San Francisco theater that had been founded in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Tech grads. And he directed all over, including USO tours for the Army.

At age 40, he realized he wasn't really trained to do some of the things he was doing and, more important, wasn't sure of his own taste, so he went back for a master's of fine arts.

He was admitted to Carnegie Mellon but chose Cal Arts in Los Angeles. There, it went much as it had at San Francisco State: he started as a student, signed on to teach temporarily (partly so he could keep taking courses in architecture or Balinese dancing or whatever tweaked his curiosity) and ended up 15 years later as head of the acting and directing programs.

"I'm a terrible administrator," he says. "I had a fabulous secretary who did all the work."

Much of his directing has been of musicals, from "Beauty and the Beast" to "The Full Monty" and "Rocky Horror Show," although his taste runs more to the latter two. He also choreographed San Francisco's perennial revue, "Beach Blanket Babylon."

Some steady directing gigs have been at Santa Rosa Rep, at a theater endowed by Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich., and at Quantum. Although Boos had been a student at Cal Arts, she had not studied with Henderson, so she first hired him on the recommendation of a Cal Arts actor friend who had.

Theater is a small world. Bridget Conners, one of Henderson's Cal Arts students, is now head of voice, speech and movement at Point Park; her mother was one of Henderson's teachers. John Shepard, head of acting at Point Park, once danced in a "Hello Dolly" Henderson choreographed at Santa Rosa. And playing opposite Walsh in "Therese Raquin" is Hugo Armstrong, one of Henderson's Cal Arts students who has come often to Quantum.

In a long career, Henderson has directed a lot of "industrials," which he describes as "two hours about a computer." In those shows, you just do what works. But he describes his real style as, "I have no idea what's going to happen when we're done, but let's try it." He enjoys rehearsing but never knows how good a show is until audience response tells him.

"I'm scared all the time when I direct. That's OK. You can never stop learning."